The Courier & Advertiser (Angus and Dundee)
Far from a sorry sight
If you’re finding it hard to decide what you might go to see at the vast annual Edinburgh Festival(s), let me point you in the right direction. Last Saturday, the husband, a couple of friends and I went to see a show at Dancebase in the capital’s Grassmarket, a centre of excellence and innovation in contemporary dance.
Now, if that sounds like your idea of cultural hell, I can understand that – I know little or nothing about dance, I have two left feet (any sense of rhythm I have stops at the knees) and some modern presentations are just about as difficult to understand as an early-morning/late-night Donald Trump tweet.
This, however, was based on Shakespeare’s Macbeth, with the emphasis on the role of Lady Macbeth. The point was to go back to the bard’s original story and explore what happened – via following the will to power and the determination to kill your way to the top – to the woman in the otherwise male-dominated picture.
I can’t recommend it highly enough: three male dancers, alone on stage for an hour, produced a wonderful, strong, intense, touching, unbelievably affecting performance. Taking Shakespeare’s Lady’s own words when she urges the fates to “unsex me here” and make her capable of things that women aren’t supposed even to think about, the tale unfolded in a way that made gender completely irrelevant. It was riveting – and very thought-provoking.
Lady Macbeth, of course, is still so often cited as the true baddie in the story of the Scottish Play, the one who eggs her weak but generally good-hearted husband on to crimes of terrible violence and pays the price at the end by going mad because she can’t face what she has done.
It’s melodrama, of course but when you see it played out in a different way – and in the wider context through which we are living at the moment – you can see it as a story for the ages.
Women in public life are, of course, still judged by different criteria to men in the same positions. Politicians’ spouses especially (still usually women, in spite of Mesdames Thatcher, May and Merkel) are still frequently branded as the power behind the throne, the eminence grise, the greater (unelected) woman behind the great (elected) man.
Look no further than the furore currently going on about the possibility of Brigitte Trogneux, wife of the French premier Emmanuel Macron, becoming First Lady of France with an office, a role and a budget. This, of course, is a result of the rest of the world following the US model, where the wives of the presidents have traditionally held official public, if not politically active roles, and espoused (what an apt verb) causes that have tended to be social and charitable rather than influential legislatively or judicially. Even then, the Americans didn’t like it when a capable First Lady was given a proper job to do – Bill and Hillary’s “two for the price of one” just didn’t wash.
Fair enough. They’re not elected. But me, I think that it’s a mistake to expect the spouse to take on a set role, not because these women aren’t capable of contributing constructively but because it’s not actually their own job. Most of them, in the modern era at least, should and very probably have, better things to do with their time than follow their men around and try to look interested in projects they really known nothing very much about.
Lady Macbeth, of course, whether she really existed or was just a fantastically compelling figure in a highly believable drama, didn’t have any alternative. In her time, that was all that was open to her. Women married power and exercised it through other people. Or, like Mary I and Elizabeth I, in whose era the story of Macbeth took the form we know today, rather than the historical facts of the Dark Ages Scottish leader, who inherited power from a father who was so desperate to have a male heir that he divorced/ executed their mothers to get one. Much good, in the long run, it did him.
But has much changed? Look at our world. Not a lot, it seems.
It’s often claimed that history, literature, the past in general, is less and less relevant to how we live and exist today. The dance piece I saw last week (by Company Chordelia and Solar Bear, in case you want to find out more – and I urge you to do just that) demonstrated just how wrong that assumption is. It knocked down the boundaries between assumptions of what people do and how they act; it showed a woman, represented by men, in all the flawed, frustrated and fixated activity of trying to fit into a role that wasn’t hers and should never have been foisted on her.
Go and see this show if you can. Whether it will mean the same to you as it did to me, I don’t know. But it will certainly give you pause for thought. And pause to consider how much or how little things have changed in our expectations of who does what and why in the world of power.
“Women in public life are, of course, still judged by different criteria to men...